


Who we are now

by deliverusfromsburb



Series: Tuesjade Prompts [13]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, but it became those shitty wire music stands, if you were in music in high school you know they are the devil's creation, the antagonist of this was supposed to be existential anxiety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 09:21:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13268451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: tuesjade prompt: flower language





	Who we are now

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently in flower language chamomile means "energy in the face of adversity", which is quite a mouthful. To me, it's what I drink when I want to feel less anxious. And yes, I have made depression tea. It doesn't taste the same.

The door is cracked open, and you slip into Jade's room before you can talk yourself out of it. You don't make any noise, and she doesn't look up, but she asks, "Do you need anything?"

You wish you hadn’t ditched the shades. Makes it harder to look nonchalant. "Can't I just stop by to say hello?"

"You haven't in a long time."

You're still getting used to this new Jade who bites back. It's embarrassing to have to relearn one of your oldest friends, but it’s a little late to worry about your dignity. “Rose is with Kanaya, and the other session’s watching a movie together, so I’m working my way through the list of people who tolerate my company. Plus, Whiskers the destroyer is on the prowl again.”

The corner of her mouth turns up. “So you want protection, is that it?”

“Show some compassion for the bottom of the food chain. I’m trying to avoid being vored by a pink princess cat here. That’s how the Circle of Life goes, right? Of course, the lions gotta eat. Is this a major plothole that parents have to cover for later? No, Junior, I’m sure Simba’s a vegan.” Your mouth is set to autopilot at this point, while you check out the room. You haven’t been in here yet.

Potted plants crowd the windowsill – that never changes. Jade hasn’t rehung any of her old posters, though. Instead, a few drawings done with Calliope and Jake are pinned to the wall. They look like band-aids stretched to cover empty space, attempts to bridge the gap between who you used to be and who you are now.

You never had anything worth calling “your room” on the ship, just a place to pass out for as long as you could set your sleep mode to. You never decorated it beyond a pile of sheets, the detritus of daily life (clothes, headphones, chip bags, other essentials), and an assortment of smuppets that you swore were capable of independent motion. The belongings left in your apartment didn’t feel like yours to claim. Besides, between thirteen years of playing Saw Junior and a year of sweating on LOHAC, you didn’t have fond memories.

This is “home” now. You have “a room”. (Despite having most of her belongings jettisoned along with their meteor, Rose has already trashed hers. She generates clutter the way stars generate radiation.) But it’s still only somewhere to sleep. Even settling on a color of sheets is too much of a commitment.

Jade may have gotten further in interior decorating, but the broad expanses on the walls are far from the colorful, cluttered bedroom you’d caught glimpses of on video chats before her robot blew it to pieces. It’s sparser than her battleship room too, which filled up with stuffed animals and every specibus she mastered in quick succession. A lot of you haven’t settled in yet.

“Carnivores can’t stay healthy on a vegan diet,” Jade says when you wind down. “Maybe they ate prey animals who die of natural causes?”

“Mufasa’s running death panels for elderly antelopes. This is what the Republicans warned us about.”

“Jaspers doesn’t need another chewtoy, so you can hide out here.” She starts to push herself away from her desk. “Can you keep yourself busy, or –”

“No, keep on doing whatever you’re doing.” The last thing you want is to make a nuisance of yourself. If she kicks you out, you don’t know where you’ll go. Your favorite spot on the roof is taken. You squint at the computer screen. She’s shopping for… daisies? “You didn’t hear this from me, but you could yank some of those out of the neighbor’s yard. I’ve seen that guy come out once to get the paper and it was like a cryptid sighting. I’ll play lookout and man a spotter twitter if you want.”

 “I’m shopping for chamomile,” she explains. “People make teas out of it. It’s supposed to be soothing.”

You’ve been floating uncomfortably, wondering when it’s acceptable to sit. She’s gotten her bass out for the first time in a long time, leaning it against the wall next to one of those wire music stands that’s always collapsing in on itself. This one has been MacGyvered into submission with hair ties and paperclips. There’s a stool next to the stand, and you sink down onto it. “I know supermarkets are a new concept for you, but you can buy that shit dried and ready to stick in a mug and microwave. You don’t even have to pull it out of the ground.”

“Microwave?”

“Come on, are you telling me you’ve never made depression tea?”

She twists around in her chair so you can see her stick her tongue out. “It doesn’t taste the same.”

“That’s not the _point_ of depression tea. Besides, you leave the damn bag in when you drink it.”

“I like it stronger,” she insists. This has been a habitual three-way breakfast debate for years now. No one has conceded defeat yet.

“Just drink coffee then,” you say, your standard response. “It’s better anyway.”

She shakes her head at you and turns back to her desk. “Setting aside your beverage opinions, which are bad and wrong, I want to start gardening again. I miss it. And it’s something to do.”

Without SBURB’s system of goals to meet and echeladders to climb, everyone’s been at a loss. It’s easy to fall apart with no structure. You offered to alphabetize Jane’s pantry a week ago. “Odd jobs just don’t go that far with fifteen people on deck, huh?”

She flicks the trackpad and sends the website scrolling to the bottom. “I’ve known about the game for as long as I can remember, and all I wanted to do was help the rest of you get through. I guess I feel at loose ends.”

“Join the club. I’m a game guide for a game that’s over. Talk about superfluous.” You shift on your seat and wince as your wing sends a few pages of sheet music fluttering to the ground. “If it makes you feel better, Hal says Dirk doesn’t know what to do with himself now either. The guy can never chill. That’s why he made his new and improved toaster last week. He was trying to be helpful.”

She sends the sheet music back to its position with a flick of her fingers.  Half of it cascades down again, and this time she doesn’t bother to fix it. “The one that shot Karkat’s toast back into his face because it was set to attack mode?”

“That’s the one.” You stifle a snicker – she disapproves of your continued, semi-sincere feud with your alien housemates.

“If I start tinkering with household appliances, do the world a favor and have John knock me out again.”

“Remember most of us don’t cook with nuclear fission and you’ll be fine.” You’ve never been good at reassurance. That was always her job, until you and John drove her over the fucking edge into murdertown. “I think that’s part of Rose’s Skaia crusade too. Not saying it’s not to help - she’s been determined to right the wrongs of the world since preschool. But it’s something to important to do.” Rose spent her whole childhood thinking her mom was conspiring against her, for fuck’s sake. If she didn’t have something to fight, she’d have to become a supervillain just for the hell of it.

Jade reaches over and tugs a dead leaf off one of her plants. “I keep thinking a garden will need me.”

Nothing in this universe needs you. You don’t even have a potted plant to water. Jesus. Maybe you should get a pet rock.

 “Did you know there’s this morbid Navy tradition where if a sub goes missing, it’s not listed as destroyed?” You’ve spent a lot of time online these days, picking up random facts like a trailing blanket picks up lint. SBURB didn’t kill you, but cracked.com might. “It’s “still on patrol”. The ocean’s deep as fuck and we’ve scattered ships all over it like a kid dumping their toy chest all over the carpet for the adults to step on. Who knows? They might find that lost aircraft carrier under the sofa in another few decades, can’t discount that possibility.” She’s fiddling with the mouse again, but her ears are back, so you think she’s listening. “It’s like I’m sitting in some cabin full of gnarly barnacle encrusted skeletons waiting for new coordinates. I mean… you remember what the game guide gig was like. Now.” You’d quietly resented the way she held those memories at arm’s length. It was a reminder of how easily you too could be overwritten. “You know how SBURB makes us. We’re here to do things, not be anything. So here I am, stuck waiting for orders that are never gonna come.” This all sounds heavier than you meant it. “But hey, I’m not at the bottom of the ocean. That’s a definite plus.”

She abandons the mouse and stares at the ceiling. “How about this for an order? Have a good life.”

“Instructions were unclear. I got my dick caught in the ceiling fan.”

That gets her attention enough to turn around again. “You _what_?”

“That’s a 2012 vintage meme. Roxy’s been getting me up to speed.” God forbid that your occasional attempts at humor be outdated. “Hey, maybe you powergamers need achievements to get you motivated. Got out of bed. Three meals in one day. Master one month’s worth of bullshit Internet gags.”

“Highest ACT?” she offers. “Jane’s been talking about us getting GEDs sometime.”

“I’ll warn you right now, I’ve got a calculator in my brain and I’m not afraid to use it.” Wait, GEDs? “The fuck, is she thinking about _college_?”

She shrugs. “She was only in the game for a few months. And she had a mostly normal life before that. It’s not as hard for her to get back on track.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t know...” she says cautiously. You’re not entirely sure she knows what college is, beyond whenever representations she saw in the media that made it to hellmurder island. She’d probably be disappointed to learn kids don’t typically break out in song in high school. “It’s a milestone, right? One of those things people expect in their life.”

“You’d be student teaching the physics department by sophomore year. Blowing the professors’ minds like yeah, aliens are real, and you want proof? I live with a bunch of ‘em. Making powerpoints full of candids of Terezi raiding the fridge at 2 am.”

“I’m not sure extraterrestrial life is within the domain of physics.” She leans against the back of the chair, elbow propped up on the armrest. “Did you ever think about what you might go on to do, before the game?”

Future planning had never resonated with you as a kid. A life outside the constant guerilla warfare of your apartment? Ask me when I don’t have to check behind the shower curtain every day. “I’m a man of many talents. Nationally acclaimed filmmaker, amateur musician, Forbes 30 under 30 for visionary webcomic work. How can I choose one way to share my genius with the people?”

“Music!” She snaps to attention and reaches for her phone. “That reminds me! I was sorting through old files and I found this. Take a look.” She tosses the phone over, and you catch it just in time. There’s a nameless sound file pulled up. When you tap the play button, it takes you a few moments to recognize the song.

It’s a piece the three of you had been working on a few months into your yellow yard trip. It hadn’t gone well. You’d been a year out of practice, and none of you could agree on what key to end it in. Still, it brings back memories. There’s the one bass riff Jade had punched the air after perfecting. There's that chord John hated because he said it was impossible. "You'd need six fingers on your left hand," he'd complained. "I’m the only one here who can actually play piano, I know how this works. I'll show you sometime."

The track ends halfway through a measure. You wait for the next note, but then the replay icon pops up. You didn't end that session meaning to abandon it. You'd just stopped for the day and never come back. Life is full of things you think you'll get back to. After John and Jade died, you'd memorized your last conversations with them, scrolling back through green and blue text and wishing you'd said something better. One of the ways you'd passed the last year on the ship was envisioning the parting words you wanted to go out on. Then Aranea sent a planet hurtling out of orbit, and in the seconds before impact you'd realized your last words to everyone weren't going to be special at all.

“Maybe we could all finish it sometime,” she says.

You blink and look away from the screen.  “I still think it’s wrong to end it in a major key.”

She tilts her head, like she’s listening to the track in her head. “Maybe you’re right. But natural minor is better than harmonic minor. You always overused that.”

“They’re both different flavors of cliché. John can cast the deciding vote.” 

“I think I can talk him into giving it another try. Does that mean you’ll do it?”

You toss her phone back in a wide arc, and she grabs it out of the air without looking. Showoff. “Yeah. Sure. That’d be cool. Something to do.”

She turns the device over in her hands. “Maybe it’s normal after all, to keep trying to schedule out your life. Or maybe I’m just crazy.” Her phone sails dangerously close to the wall when she throws her arms out. “Everyone else is settling in. Shouldn’t I just be happy to _be_? Isn’t that what we were playing for?”

You’re not sure why she’s asking you of all people this, when you wake up every morning surprised to be here. When you’d jumped into that kernelsprite, the plan was simple. Save John. Help the others. Then die. Foolproof, Rose had called it, which just goes to show you’re a bigger idiot than even she gave you credit for. “I don’t know what everyone else was playing for. I wasn’t expecting to win.”

“And we did.” She sets her phone back on the desk and watches as its screen reverts to black. “This is winning. I guess.”

Players keep leveling up after they hit God Tier, not that anyone really cares at that point. On the yellow yard, robbed of its typical ending, the game kept incrementing past the max, freewheeling in a zone where the numbers didn’t mean anything anymore. Some things don’t need to be measured. “Maybe there’s just a high score,” you say. “Like… how long you’ve been breathing, or something.”

She considers that. “John’s in the lead then, since he didn’t die on his last birthday.”

You roll your eyes. “It’s a _personal_ high score. Otherwise we’re all getting our asses kicked by the oldest person alive.”

She leans over the back of her chair again and rests her chin on the edge. “So the goal is to keep breathing, huh?”

You shrug, and the music stand behind gives up completely and falls over. “Shit,” you mutter under your breath, but she’s laughing. “Got anything better?”

She smiles, and the music stand rights itself with a disgruntled screech. You scoot forward a few inches, just in case. “Just keep breathing. I can work with that.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm graduating soon and losing a lot of the structure in my life and I may have some anxiety about that. Anyway, happy 2018, everyone. Keep on breathing.


End file.
